Freely They Fell
by Arsenic In Your Tea
Summary: A changeling stolen from her crib. A warrior desperate to save the woman he loves. A path descending into hell. Isn't this the stuff fairytales are made of? Thirteen years ago, Clarissa was spirited away by the fae. Now the Court have taken another Shadowhunter girl, Adele Morgenstern, and her parabatai, Jace Herondale, will do anything to get her back. Please read and review!
1. Prologue: Paved With Good Intentions

Nora Shard often dealt with the fae. They were unpredictable in payment - sometimes they gave her gold coins from a hundred years before her birth and sometimes they gave her handfuls of dead moths and rusted iron nails, and no matter what they gave her, the messenger's smile was always the same.

Sharp and curved, like a scythe.

Nora Shard despised that smile.

But work was work, and the courts kept her busy - both Seelie and Unseelie, Summer and Winter, Light and Dark. Though they had magic, the witchcraft of the sidhe was an abstract thing, like trying to craft smoke. There were some things that required the touch of a warlock like herself. So she followed their headless messengers on skeleton horses beneath the hill and trailed through hallways of thorns behind one-eyed girls with ribcages exposed to the air and waited in crypts wrought of skulls and yellowed bones to meet the king and queen who dressed in shawls of slowly twitching butterflies stitched into the semblance of fabric. What could she say? When they paid, they paid well.

Nora Shard was not a young woman. She was not a woman at all, truth be told, but she was old, old, old. She had seen the temples of her youth fall beneath a dictatorship (and be reconstructed in the modern era as a tourist attraction). She had seen the world burn a hundred times over in the grip of war (and each time was told it would be the last, most final and greatest of all wars). She had seen friends die, fall and fade beneath the ravages of that most ancient enemy, time (and had tired of friendship too many times to count). In private, she rather believed herself to have seen all the world had to offer. Nothing could surprise her now.

Until the day after she had saved the Unseelie queen from the brink of death and opened her apartment door to find a child on the doorstep.

She had fire for hair. She had emeralds for eyes. She had skin like porcelain and white half-moons for nails.

And the messenger who stood over her had a smile as sharp and curved as a scythe

They had taken the girl from Shadowhunter parents, the messenger told Nora. The Nephilim had angered the courts, drawn blood from their citizen, as the Nephilim so often did, and so they had retaliated against the Nephilim with the bloodiest hands and taken what was most precious to him. Crawled in through an open window and pulled the girl from her crib. The parents had not, the messenger confided in Nora, bothered to tie blackthorn branches to the window-sill or sew iron nails onto the bars of the basket. They had grown arrogant, the Angel's Children. They believed themselves untouchable, and they had been as wrong as it was possible to be.

Well, Valentine Morgenstern and Jocelyn Fairchild had paid for their mistake.

The girl was perhaps four or five years old. She was asleep, a bruise blossoming on her cheek, Nephilim blood beneath her skin. But she was young, and the Clave's venom had yet to sink deep enough to rot.

Nora Shard often dealt with the fae. They were unpredictable in payment - sometimes they gave her gold coins from a hundred years before her birth and sometimes they gave her handfuls of dead moths and rusted iron nails, and once, just once, they gave her a little girl.

Clarissa, Nora called the little changeling, like the herb. Clarissa.

And Clarissa grew up with one rule: never let the invisible men know you can see them. Never let the Shadowhunters know who you are. If you see the Nephilim, then know that they see you - and run.


	2. Chapter 1: Seems A Heaven

Down on 39th Avenue in Queens, there stood a red-brick bakery run by a wizard who would devour your heart given half a chance.

Or so the rumour went.

This wizard would charm the prettiest girls into the red-brick bakery and crack their ribs open with a single malicious word. He would dig into their chest with the talons of a wolf and pull out a still-beating heart to be eaten whole. And then he would animate the beautiful, awful corpse as a puppet without strings and force it to drown itself in the river, never to be seen again.

Or so the rumour went.

So whenever Nora Shard developed a craving for baozi, zimaqiu or red-bean mooncakes, she always sent Clarissa down to the red-brick bakery on 39th Avenue in Queens. After all, the warlock told the girl, she had nothing to fear. She didn't have a heart to devour.

Clarissa did not find this as inspiring as perhaps Nora hoped it would be.

But she didn't mind too much. She liked going down to the bakery, which shed its name so often that she never bothered to try and remember what it was called on a given day in a given week. She liked peering in the windows at the little gold neko cats waving frantically at passersby and at the actual living breathing cat moving languidly along the sill with a mutinous expression that suggested that, if his owner did not devour your heart, then it might steal your tongue instead. She liked the smell of jakfruit and baking dough and steamed bananas which always filled the air and hit her like a brick wall whenever she stepped across the threshold.

And despite all the rumours, she even liked the heart-devouring wizard who ran it.

"Magnus?" Clarissa called hesitantly as she unzipped her jacket and left her umbrella neatly in the corner. The cafe was warm and dimly lit by floating fireflies that drifted lazily around the room in the aftermath of the draught created and destroyed by the opening and shutting of the door. Broken glass on the walls caught that self-same glow and reflected back a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times until the room was smouldering with every colour Clarissa could recognise and even a few for whom her artist's tongue could offer no name. "Hello?"

Silence, but for the soft, metronomically unhappy purr of the cat on the window. And then, from the back room, a crash and a series of oaths drifted out to meet her.

"Ah, shit."

So he was here.

Clarissa dropped her bag into the ground beside the counter and crouched to consider the display. She couldn't help but wonder if every mundane looking at the foods here thought the same thing she did - that the cupcakes looked like they were probably poisonous but that it would certainly be the most delicious poison you had ever tasted in your life. They were pretty in the same way razorblades or blackthorn bushes or Clarissa herself were pretty - despite their very nature.

Something tightened around her leg like a hangman's noose and Clarissa glanced down to see the cat winding determinedly around her Doc Martens like they had personally committed some grievous offense against him. "Hello, Mr Chairman," she said softly, and stooped to pick him up. He went instantly limp and then set his head mutinously under her elbow and feigned death as he always did. Nora had never allowed Clarissa to have a pet; the ravens they kept in cages by the window and the stray dogs she fed scraps of dinner could hardly be termed pets. So a small and childish part if her delighted in petting Chairman Meow's ears and mumbling something complimentary about being a good boy.

"Happy birthday, heartless girl," Magnus said, his voice reaching her before he did, and Clarissa grinned to see him. He was looking as he always did - hair like shredded velvet, cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood and eyes like a disgruntled cat that hadn't slept in a week.

"Oh," she said. "You've got a little bit of..." She pulled her sleeve over her hand and Magnus turned his face towards her so she could wipe away the dusting of icing sugar that had settled beneath one of his yellow eyes. "You're busy, huh."

"It's the solstice in two days," he said. "Apparently that's an important fact."

"Nora always said so."

"Must be true, then."

He put the tray of baked wheat rolls he was carrying on top of the glass display case and began to set them down onto the different platters while Clarissa watched distractedly.

She had chosen her birthday, all those years ago. Nora had only ever hazarded guesses as to her age - no older than ten, no younger than six, however old the last Qing emperor had been at death, old enough to bring hunting hellhounds in the Nevada desert - and birthdays had seemed always seemed a vaguely foreign concept. She hadn't consulted her ersatz stepmother on the matter of her birthday - she could remember simply announcing it one day as they were peeling apples in the cramped kitchen of an apartment on the east side of Flushing, Queens. "You know it's my birthday tomorrow?"

"Is it?" Nora hadn't batted an eye.

"Yes. I'm seven."

"Cool. Well, it's too short notice to buy you a present now. Maybe next year, when you're eight."

She hadn't been bluffing. Nora hadn't got her a gift that year. But the ifrit without eyes who lived in the apartment above them had given her a leather-bound diary from the era of Emperor Kōkaku and a good set of shading pencils from the Korean newsagent down the road, and Nora's old mentor Baba Yaga had brought her fishing for butterflies on the Hudson bridge with iron nails and blossoming lilies for hooks, and the faerie messenger who came that day to pay Nora for her weather work for the Wild Hunt had given her a fistful of African trade beads and a smile like a scythe. So Clarissa liked birthdays, even her own strange birthdays.

"Eighteen," Magnus was saying. "Eighteen years old. Only a matter of time before you're an old woman."

"Found a grey hair this morning," Clarissa said in abject despair. "I'm sure there'll be two tomorrow. Three the next day. Do you think grey will suit me, Magnus?"

"You'll age gracefully, Rissa. Pretty girls always do."

"He said, with a young maiden's heart cooling on his windowsill like an apple pie."

"Lies and slander." Magnus' eyes smiled even if his mouth didn't, and he finished his arrangement with a flourish as Clarissa applauded politely. "Oh, stop, you're too kind."

"You know," she said. "Nora didn't think you'd last a year running this place without getting bored."

"Oh, I know." There was a conspiratorial smirk in his voice. "Trust me, Rissa. On day three hundred and sixty six, I'm boarding up the windows of this place for good. But I do like to prove her wrong."

"Mm."

"You want anything?" he asked, and she knew he knew the answer before she even said it, but he asked anyway and she love him for that small piece of vain kindness.

"Nah," Clarissa said, as cheerfully as she could muster. "I'm good."

"You sure?"

"Tea would be nice."

He pushed up the counter and she ducked under it to grab a styrofoam cup with an ill-fitting plastic lid. "By the way," he said. "When it comes to hearts I am equal opportunities. I don't discriminate between young maidens and young..."

"Squires," Clarissa suggested helpfully.

"Precisely. Broiled and seasoned, they taste precisely the same, I assure you."

"I'll take your word for it." Clarissa laughed.

"Not a delicacy you've pursued?"

"I don't think it would suit my palette."

"Yes," Magnus said distantly. "It is an acquired taste, I believe."

"And you wonder why this place is on its last legs."

"The business isn't struggling," Magnus said. "It's exclusive."

"Mm," Clarissa said. "That's certainly one word for it."

"Speaking of struggling," the warlock said. "School is...?"

"Nearly finished," Clarissa said. "Thankfully."

She usually would sit on the counter, legs folded under her and a cat splayed lazily on her lap purring like an overheating engine, talking about nothing for as long as the rain persisted, but today her sketchpad was burning in her bag, heavy with the guilt of unfinished work, and she didn't think she could face another sleepless night trying to meet another nine o'clock deadline without suffering some kind of aneurysm. So she slid back under the partition and pulled up the warmest of armchairs to collapse into, one boot trailing laces and propped up against the low coffee table as Magnus flicked on the radio and continued about his business, humming under his breath.

Devourer of hearts he may have been, but Clarissa could not lay claim to many friends, and even fewer who knew both sides to her life. Nora could not be called a friend. Nora was something between a victorious Rumpelstiltskin and a malignant fairy godmother.

Maybe everyone felt like that about their parents, though.

"You know," Magnus was saying thoughtfully as he wiped the counter with a rag. "I heard an interesting rumour about you the other day.

"Me?"

"And a certain young fellow named Elias..."

Clarissa was about to blush when the chimes over the door rattled out an alarm. The door swung open and in howled the wind and the rain and a hunting pack of Shadowhunters in bloodied black gear.


	3. Chapter 2: Stol'n On His Wing

Magnus wore his contempt like an ill-fitting second skin, and observed the intruding Shadowhunters with the same expression as he typically reserved for the little torn and bloodied corpses that Chairman Meow dragged into the bakery late in the morning.

"Valentine's girls and boys," he said with a rigor mortis voice that spoke of both fear and loathing, both bone-deep. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Clarissa froze in place, her muscles threaded with ice as she recognised the implications of Magnus' words. The Nephilim didn't come this far south, to the streets and alleys that formed the lattice of the Downworld, unless they intended to bring blood and chaos in their wake. They left teeth and strings of flesh behind them, and the singing, shining memory of knives as bright and as sharp as broken glass. They left the bodies where they fell.

And they had glimmering, feral eyes.

"No pleasure," said the dark haired man. "Official Clave business."

"I see," Magnus said darkly, and Clarissa feigned deafness and blindness as her pencil moved senselessly across the page. She could not see them. She could not hear them. They were nothing but shadows behind her, faint wraiths and spectres that did not and could not belong to a real and sensible world. And if she could not see them, they had no reason to see her.

"Do you." It was a girl's voice, reedy and brittle, but somehow sweet, an untuned instrument, and boots moved against the floor.

Clarissa angled her head towards her sketchpad but from the very corner of her eye caught a glimpse of the men and women in black, somehow vulturesque in their movements, their gestures, as they moved about the shop and the counter. They had travelled, as Shadowhunters always seemed to travel, in pairs - all of them tall, two dark-haired figures, one blond, a girl with a long red braid that whipped about her shoulders like a wild snake as she moved her head. The dark woman was sweeping icing on one finger from a cupcake in her hand and flashing a grin like cyanide.

"I do," the warlock responded, his eyes moving quickly to watch each of the hunters as they moved. "Whose blood are you wearing, may I enquire?"

The dark woman was dismissive. " _Sed lex, dura lex._ The fae will think twice before contravening the Accords again. The ifrits will reconsider before defending them a second time."

"Your High Warlock is doing a poor job of keeping his people in check," the red girl murmured.

"Sveta Loss is a dangerous rogue," the dark woman added. "And you will share her fate if you abet her."

"You would do well to think about our offer," the dark man said. "We were diverted from our course to pursue your response. You have not changed your mind...?" But Magnus' voice had a hint of a snarl in it, the faintest ghost of the demon blood that hung in his veins, as he responded:

"I have no intention of crawling on my belly for the son of Robert Lightwood."

"You might live to regret that," the dark-haired man said coldly.

"Oh, I doubt it. Is that all?"

The blond man's voice was scathing. "In a hurry to see us out, Bane?"

"What can I say?" Magnus' gaze moved and Clarissa's eyes moved with his, to catch a glimpse of where the Shadowhunter's hand rested on the hilt of his angel blade, a poorly veiled threat. Magnus' lip curled. "Murderers are bad for business."

The blond man glanced dismissively around the near-empty bakery. "That seems to be the least of your concern, warlock. Who's the mundane?"

"My concerns are my own." Magnus did not even bother with a smile. "The entire Downworld knows what happened to the Losses. You don't need to remind me of the rules. If that is all..."

"You didn't answer my question."

"A customer," the warlock replied. "This is a business, Nephilim, and occasinally, very occasionally, a business serves customers."

"It's a mundane," the son of Robert Lightwood said sharply. "Up to your old ways, warlock?"

Magnus' eyes were wide, pseudo-innocent in that way he had when he was so very obviously lying it was as though he had forgotten what the truth tasted like. "Oh, no," he said. "I would never."

The red girl and the blond man exchanged dubious looks.

"Just remember," the dark haired woman said. "Shelter none, and nor shall you be sheltered."

"And if we come back and find any pretty little mundanes floating in the Hudson," the blond said. "You won't have any fingers left to tear hearts with."

"Get out," Magnus said, and although they had no reason to do as he said, the group seemed to have tired of their little game so with a movement of his head, the dark man indicated a retreat.

The door swung open.

And yet, footsteps approached.

Clarissa tensed, but did not turn, strangling her pencil in a pinched two-finger grip but remaining resolutely ignorant, not permitting her head to even turn in the direction of the Shadowhunter that moved to approach her.

Her hair was alive, a mass of wires, her skin itching as though caged within her flesh crawled a horde of centipedes and spiders at the mere thought of a Claven soldier so close to her. And yet, just as the Shadowhunter's shadow melded with hers, Magnus' voice cut through the silence, irritated.

"Nephilim."

The footsteps slowed and stopped.

"Perhaps you didn't hear me." Magnus' voice was undiluted venom, unfiltered by acerbic passivity. "I _said_ , get. Out."

"Jace," the red girl said. She held out a pale, burned hand to gesture to her friend. "It's not worth it."

A pause, and Clarissa's pencil continue to spiral blindly across the page, forming formless figures with seven eyes and twice as many heads, figures with bare ribs and tattered moth wings where shoulders should be. After a moment, the footsteps retreated, slowly, deliberately, and the wind howled through the door; the Shadowhunters disappeared in its wake.

For a moment, the silence rushed back in to fill the space and Clarissa held her breath as though to ensure they were really gone, her pencil sliding slowly to a stop at the edge of the page, and Magnus exhaled before she did.

"You should go," he said, and Clarissa didn't need to be told twice, snatching up her bag, and stuffing her pencils in her pockets.

"What was that about?"

"Posturing," Magnus said malignantly, but that was not quite true and warlock and changeling alike both knew it. He caught her arm as she went to pass him and steered her back the way she had come, flipping up the counter top to let her pass. "Take the back door," Magnus said. "They might be waiting outside."

"Waiting...?"

Clarissa followed him through the narrow corridor that joined shop to kitchen, walled in on either side by high-piled cardboard boxes labelled _leeks_ or _live mice_ , and then through the dark room with an atmosphere more icing sugar than oxygen, and then out of the fire exit that led onto an alleyway paved with pristine snow untouched by footprints, the air unmarred by breath.

"Here." Clarissa hadn't realised Magnus was gone until he was back again, carrying three long white boxes that he handed, one at a time, to the green-eyed changeling. "Baozi for Nora... I'll add it to the tab, tell her to reheat them in the microwave... Lekváros tekercs for the little one, I didn't know what she likes..."

Clarissa thought of Sveta Loss, small and sapphire-skinned, a fugitive and orphan at only twelve years old. "She eats moths," she said uncertainly. "And the wings of flies."

"Duly noted," the warlock said. "I know just the place. And this..." The last white box, smaller and flatter than the others, bound with a silver chain rather than butcher's twine. He smiled, just a little, a clouded kind of smile. "Happy birthday, Rissa."

"You shouldn't have."

"Nonsense." He cocked his head, his yellow eyes mirthful. "You mundanes only have so many birthdays, my darling - we should celebrate while we can."

Clarissa rose onto the tips of her toes but even then Magnus had to stoop slightly so she could press her lips to the cool skin in the hollow of his cheek, right where the bone curved into pleasantly symmetrical and angular precision. "Thank you."

" _De rien_."

"And please, be careful. If you keep talking back to them like that, they'll cut your tongue out someday."

"You might find you're grateful for the silence, heartless girl."

"Never," Clarissa said, and rather meant it. She had endured enough soundlessness for a lifetime. "This job the Clave want you to do for them..."

Magnus shook his head. "They place me between the devil and the deep blue sea, and ask me to choice between damnation and drowning. No good can come of either side. All I can do is delay. The fae are patient and the Nephilim are mortal."

"Procrastination," Clarissa said. "A characteristic tactic, if ever there was one." She stepped back from the threshold and shivered in the sudden cold. "Enjoy your baked heart."

"Give your godmother my regards."

Magnus did not close the door but remained with a watchful eye on the fire of her hair until the girl had reached the corner of the alley and, peering about it, found the street ahead to be quite full of mundanes and quite devoid of Shadowhunters. Then he disappeared back into the bowels of the shop and Clarissa, carefully placing the boxes into her bag so that they would not be damaged or come open during the walk back, flipped up her hood and put her hands in her pockets.

She could have been any human girl, Sightless and rooted within the world of mundanity, but for the green of her eyes and the red of her hair. She faded into the streets as the world yawned into a chasm and swallowed her whole.

And an invisible man dressed in shadows peeled away from the gloom and followed her silently into the city.


	4. Chapter 3: In Golden Urns Draw Light

The stairwell leading to Nora Shard's apartment was narrow and dim, what little light illuminating the small space weak and flickering intermittently - with every emission of magic from the warlock's small flat, the bulbs would sputter and choke, and with every lull in spell-casting they would briefly blaze forward again like little fervent sparks. Clarissa wound her way up the stairs, lost in her own thoughts; she could have tread this path in the deepest of sleeps, so familiar it was to her. She had tucked Magnus' white boxes under one arm, her other hand clutching the strap of her satchel like she was wary it might attempt to take flight when she was otherwise distracted - and it was very easy to become distracted on the long voyage up to Nora's domain.

The door to the Shards' apartment might have been mundane in another setting, appearing as it did to be a quite ordinary wooden door, red paint peeling and bronze handle neglected and unpolished. However, another eye would catch the subtle hints of otherness: the runes marking the wood close to the hinges, their elegant overlapping script speaking of ancient protections and even more ancient warnings; the faintest scent of sulphur clinging to the air as one approached the door, brimstone infiltrating the space like a liar; the almost imperceptible hiss of electricity coursing through the handle as one grasped it, like it was in fact hollow and filled with flies cast abuzz in a cloud.

Another might notice these aspects and be wary, but for Clarissa each of these phenomena was further confirmation that she was home - familiar and comforting, they seemed to serve as reassurances, almost, the safe haven of all she had always known closing about her in a protective cocoon. She experienced a similar relief stepping into Magnus' bakery, or the old library of Dedi in Astoria, where Nora had brought her to study when there were no errands to run and cabin fever had begun to set in. It was a sudden realisation of belonging, an easing of tension where she hadn't fully realised there was tension, a release of the thoughts that had accompanied the long climb of the stairs, so many moths caught in cupped hands. Stepping beyond the red door, Clarissa shut it behind her neatly with a little _click_. Much like an aviary, Nora Shard's apartment had two doors, one after another, and a little liminal space in between, decorated with little origami birds gathering in little flocks, nazars turning lazily on silk ribbons, strings of beads cluttering the air. Clarissa raised an arm and flicked the tail of a paper sparrow with the tip of her nail, sending it onto a restrained pirouette across the tiny space, as the red door locked itself behind her and the wrought-iron scissor gate unlocked itself in front of her. It was almost identical to the kind of gate you would find on old-fashioned elevators, and Clarissa never failed to experience a strange satisfaction at sliding it open carefully, treating it as another might a relic. A row of demonic sigils on the threshold flared as she stepped over them, but it was with a reassuring green glow rather than the pale blue that signaled danger. She called out to the other denizens of the small apartment as the gate slid shut behind her again: " _Wo huílai le_! I'm back!"

The apartment was alive with tiny birds and even tinier butterflies, each no larger than Clarissa's thumbnail, resplendent in jewel tones, vibrant in tiny swirling clouds of activity. Clarissa made her way through the hall towards the kitchen very cautiously, crunching old magic underfoot - where the butterflies and birds faltered and faded and fell, they were leeched of colour so that their path was stained into the air, and they withered like autumn-leaf-approximations of themselves, shriveling and curling into brittle shells of their previous shapes. The magic-wrought creatures became bigger the further from the front door Clarissa drew; she entered the small kitchen just in time to see Sveta snatch from the air a butterfly the size of a tennis ball. The blue-skinned little girl observed the delicate insect for a long moment before she brought it to her mouth and devoured it whole.

Nora barely acknowledged her goddaughter as the teenager entered, though her clever eyes were drawn by the white boxes Clarissa placed on the table. There wasn't a person on earth too aloof to be drawn in by Magnus' sorcery, whatever form that took. "How is the old wretch?" the warlock inquired as she abandoned her post by the stove and crossed the tiles to open the first box. As a child Clarissa had always thought Nora's fingers suited to music or the medical arts - they were long and slender and clever, and moved quickly to unknot the butcher's twine which held the box closed.

"As well as he ever is," was Clarissa's reply. She paused as she dropped her satchel onto one of the chairs, glancing at Sveta and wondering how much of the day's sudden turn she should tell Nora. Hesitating, the teenager reached forward and slid her gift out of the pile of boxes, hugging it close to her as though to draw strength from whatever lay within as she said, slowly, "he is beset by Valentine's men."

Sveta was young, but she was far from a fool, and she knew what this might mean for her - at the mention of Morgenstern, she glanced up with fear in her eyes, flitting her crocodile eyes from Nora's impassive features to Clarissa's pale, worried face. Nora did not so easily betray her heart, but there was apprehension tightening her lips as she looked at her ersatz daughter with questions brimming in her eyes like so many tears.

"And?"

"You know Bane." Clarissa allowed herself the slimmest of smiles. "They would have more easily drawn truth from a krait."

Nora nodded and reached a hand to smooth Sveta's hair; though her features never seemed to soften, and her voice never approached motherly, Clarissa knew she was doing her best in the unfamiliar role of protector. " _Itt biztonságban vagy_."

She said the words in Sveta's native tongue, but there was no mistaking the sentiment: _you are safe here_. Clarissa wasn't sure if Nora was telling the truth or, if she was, how long it would remain such, but she didn't dare dispute the idea. She went to make herself a cup of tea as Nora flicked open the bakery boxes and made a small sound of satisfaction on sighting the dumplings Magnus had sent her. The second box elicited a giggle from the sapphire-skinned Sveta, who eschewed a knife in favour of tearing chunks from the soft jam-and-cream cake within with her bare hands, darting a tongue out to test the crumbs at the tip of her fingers with a sigh. "It tastes just like Mama's," she said softly, a kind of wistfulness in her voice, "the cakes she made with skippers and antlions and moly berries."

She sound so melancholy, Clarissa could not help but lean forward to dab her finger into the cream icing on top of the cake and paint a few wide slashes onto Sveta's cheek, offering the young girl a wry smile. "Don't eat it all at once," she warned. "Magnus drowns cakes in sugar... you don't want to lose your teeth, do you?"

Sveta offered Clarissa a very bright glimpse at them as she smiled. "It's the nicest thing I've tasted in ages," she said.

"Don't ever tell him that."

Clarissa picked up her bag and glanced at Nora. "I've got some work to finish for Monday," she said. "Is it alright if I disappear for a while?"

Nora nodded, but followed Clarissa to the threshold of her room, leaving Sveta to tear apart the cake with the gusto of childhood. "Rissa," the older woman who was not a woman said softly. Now that Clarissa was older and on the cusp of full adulthood, the age disparity between godmother and goddaughter was far more difficult to discern; Clarissa often thought they looked far more like sisters these days, but there was no mistaking the acuity in Nora's gaze which spoke to long age. "Did they see you?"

She didn't need to clarify who _they_ were.

Clarissa paused, her hand on her bedroom door. She nodded. "They thought I was a mundane," she said, seeing the concern etched in Nora's brow. "Just a customer. Magnus dealt with them. Nora, I'm alright."

Nora shook her head. "They shouldn't be this deep in the Downworld," she said darkly. "Be careful. Look what happened to the Losses."

Clarissa nodded. "I know."

"Will Magnus be alright?"

Uncertainty clouded Clarissa's thoughts and eyes and voice. She thought of the warlock's tired eyes, the brittle vitriol that had coursed through his words, the clouded quality of his smile. "I'm not sure," she said, and hated herself for that uncertainty.

Nora sighed and put a weathered, tired hand on Clarissa's shoulder. "We'll weather this storm, little heartless one, as we've weathered all others."

"I never thought to believe otherwise."

"Atta girl." Nora lowered her hand and cocked her head. "You don't fancy a stroll over to Little Fuzhou? I just received a fire message from Akantha Wrath - something about an ill turul. She wants the organs harvested for spells."

Truth be told, Clarissa rather did. There were few things she adored more than wanders with Nora, running sorcerous errands with the most bizarre specifications and the oddest consequences, meeting strange people with even stranger stories, seeing the grime and steel of the city falter and give way to pure, undiluted magic. But she had to shake her head. "Maybe not today. This assignment..."

Nora nodded. "I understand." She smiled. "You're a hard worker - I have _no idea_ where you got that from."

Clarissa laughed lightly. "Oh, I learned very young that _do as I don't_ was a cardinal rule in this household."

The warlock looked as though she was searching for a way to be insulted by the girl's words, before she gave in and grinned. "That's very fair." Nora shook her head. "I'll bring Sveta... I'd feel safer if she was with me."

"It'll be good for her to get out of the apartment." The orphan would be safe, Clarissa knew - there were few Shadowhunters who could contend with Akantha Wrath alone, let alone the combined forces of Wrath and Shard.

Nora turned to return to the kitchen, and Clarissa was half inside her room when she heard her ersatz mother's parting words: "don't think I've forgotten today. We'll do something nice tonight, alright?"

"Sounds perfect," Clarissa said, and meant it.

She shut her door behind her, and crossed to open her windows. A few sparse snowflakes settled on the sill as she took in a deep, cold breath of the pale New York air, and gazed across the rooftops at the monotone sparkle of the bay, faintly visible in the distance. She was about to settle on the window seat to open Magnus' gift when there was a sharp _caw_ to her right and she leapt in fright to spot a crow shuffling its feathers in displeasure on the railing outside.

"Oh, _Durak_ ," Clarissa said in exasperation, extending her hand towards the bird with a sigh. "Don't look at me like that."

The crow leapt onto her wrist and she brought him inside as he shook snow and soot from his feathers. Up close, it was clear that he was not quite of the mundane world - his little black tongue was forked, his feathers slick with an oil that smelt faintly of arsenic, and he had six eyes, each moving independently of one another to take in the room all at once. Baba Yaga's emissary was not, as the rumours had it, capable of speech or transfiguration into a human shape, but he was an intelligent creature and he was a frequent visitor to the Shards' apartment with some message or another. On this occasion he had a scroll tied to his leg and a little woven basket strapped to his back; he seemed to consider both an indignity. Clarissa carefully untied both, and Durak took hasty flight from her wrist to take perch by the radiator to warm himself luxuriously. He spat out another _caw_ , hopping about with a nervous energy that suggested he was eager to head home again.

The scroll contained the kind of birthday message that only Yaga would send, written in a curly, almost illegible script and a cramped hand that characterised many of the scribbled notes in many of Nora's grimoires. It began with a " _fie, fie, fie_ " and ended with a lengthy treatise against the use of iron gall in ink for illumination, capped with a quintessentially Yaga pronouncement of " _The scytheman_ _has taken seventeen steps towards you, my little beautiful fool, and today he draws closer, so sharpen your knives for a_ fight." Below, a hasty postscript with a blue bill stapled to the paper: " _P.S., I have heard talk that my brother once hid his death in an egg, and so endured a century by means of subterfuge, so I have enclosed ten dollars for a visit to the supermarket._ " It was a twenty euro note. Clarissa smiled to see it, and carefully folded the letter for later perusal. One could never read a missive from Nora's mentor only once - it demanded rereading.

She could not settle to her assignment without writing a reply to thank the baba for her well wishes (if you could call them that), so she set Yaga's gift with Magnus' by the window and sat at her desk to pass her pen across paper for a time. Durak accepted his new burden with a thankful _caw_ , and pressed his beak into Clarissa's red hair to show that no insult was intended by his haste to depart. She fed him a berry from the jar she kept on her writing desk, and it stained his beak bloody, like he had just torn into a carcass. Durak bumped his head into Clarissa's hand, and took off, his wings carrying him high and fast over the New York skyline, angling for the sea. She did not envy him his long and hard journey, and watched him until he was a speck on the line of the horizon. His shape frequently found its way into the margin of her notes as she set about her schoolwork, little silhoeuttes of Durak in flight littering the pages. At some point, the dual doors were unlocked and opened and closed and locked as Nora and Sveta departed for Wrath's. The sun dipped below the horizon, and dark enveloped the rooms, chasing the sun from its embrace of the streets to cover the buildings in a dull gloom which brought forth the warm glow of streetlights in the avenues below.

She was about to open the gift Magnus had given her when she was disturbed by the abrupt and sudden the flare of all the lights in the room. The lamp by which she had been writing began to glow, brighter and brighter, until it was white-hot and white-bright, more brilliant than the cheap bulb within would allow. Even those lights she had not switched on were ablaze - the fairylights strung over her bed were tiny alarms, flashing like a heart attack. Sigils along her door flared a brilliant pale blue, and the floorboards underfoot seemed to rise and fall as though in laboured breathing. Clarissa darted to the door and made her way out into the hall, not entirely sure what she was planning to grab from the kitchen to wield as a weapon against whatever had invaded Nora's sanctuary, but stopped abruptly on glancing towards the gate.

The aviary system had worked exactly as it ought - the red door had been breached, but the ironwrought gate remained firmly shut, sealing the intruder into the tiny liminal space between the two thresholds. That wasn't to say the intruder seemed all that perturbed by his apparent capture; his scarred fingers curled around the bars of the gate, arrogant in their apparent lack of tension. His blond hair fell in artful tousles as he cocked his head to observe Clarissa with eyes like liquid gold.

 _The Shadowhunter from earlier_.

"Ah," he said. "So you _ca_ _n_ see me. I was beginning to wonder."

Clarissa said nothing.

"I have to say," the blond continued. "It's nice to see you breathing. I confess I half-believed Bane would tear your heart out before we had even shut the door behind us."

Clarissa said nothing.

"In polite society," the Shadowhunter added. "Guests are invited across the threshold when they arrive."

Clarissa said nothing.

There was a bite of anger in the Shadowhunter's voice, a tone which brokered violence and bordered on asperity. A bruise had blossomed across his cheek in the day that had elapsed since his intrusion on Magnus' bakery, and his knuckles were stained with the distinctive red of blood. His black leather gear was scuffed - Clarissa could not help but think that his day must have gone on to be unpleasant indeed.

He deserved no less.

"In _polite_ society," she replied at last, her tone that of agreement, and then she moved from his line of sight to go into Nora's study. The swords the warlock called Gan Jiang and Mo Xie were kept in a glass case by the window - each time Clarissa had asked their origin as a child, she had been treated to a different story about how exactly Nora had come to possess them. "They belonged to a very brave and very cruel Nephilim," she had said once, "and I took them from his corpse after I hung him with his own hair." Another time, they had been the blades her cruel stepfather had tried to kill her with on discovering her demonic nature - he had plunged them into her as kitchen knives, and withdrawn swords. Still again, they had grown like fruit from a tree that had been gifted to her as a seedling by the fae after she had helped to save the life of Niamh Chinn Óir, Unseelie heir of Tír fo Thuinn. Regardless of the particular story, Clarissa trusted them to be sharp - the idea she stood a chance against a trained Nephilim was risible, but damn if she wasn't going to test it anyway.

There was a screech of rending metal in the hallway. He was breaking past the protections - the Institute's pet warlocks had clearly provided him with some assistance.

Clarissa forced her hands to steady. She was not a warlock, and could not send fire messages at will, but rushed to the mantlepiece to light the candle that Nora always kept there, runes carved into the surface of the wax. There was a little legal pad next to it on which Clarissa could hastily scrawl a message, her handwriting barely readable because of the way her hand leapt with every sound the Shadowhunter made in the hallway beyond.

The door to the study crashed down just as Clarissa finished feeding her note to the flame and whirled to meet the gaze of the Shadowhunter with all the courage and defiance of which she was capable.

He was a hurricane barely contained by his scarred skin. She could see that now. There was _rage_ in his eyes.

"Enough of the games," he said, quiet fury palpable in his words. "Enough waiting. You're coming with me."

Clarissa pressed herself against the fireplace as though she could disappear into it. "You think so?"

"It's nothing personal," he said, his voice hollow.

Clarissa tightened her grip on Gan Jiang.

"It's really," the Shadowhunter repeated. "Nothing personal." Something bright flashed in his hand, and Clarissa raised her sword but it was not a blade in his hand, just a rock the size of a human heart, purple and scarred with silvery lines like quartz, and it blurred, the lines moving, its surface glowing, and it captured Clarissa's gaze, drove her breath from her lungs as surely as a blow to her solar plexus, purged all thoughts from her mind, scoured any words from her tongue, drained the energy from every fibre of her legs and arms, froze her veins and superheated her arteries, and the last thing she saw before she succumbed totally to darkness was the blond Shadowhunter moving to catch her in strong arms, and the last thing she heard before she surrendered utterly to silence was his soft apology as she sank down into unconsciousness.


End file.
